Vancouver heavy metal outfit SPELL have released their new full-length album, "Wretched Heart", today via Bad Omen Records. The follow-up to their acclaimed 2022 LP "Tragic Magic" — hailed as a celebration of "the mystique and darkness within hard rock and heavy metal" — "Wretched Heart" finds the band pushing deeper into gothic, cinematic, and hypnotic territory while keeping the urgency and human weight at the core of their songwriting.
Critical response has been immediate and enthusiastic: the album has already been called "surely the most fun metal record of the year", "gothic, hypnotic, and thunderous", "absolutely fantastic", and "a strain of metal that falls somewhere between the early bat-eating years of the immortal Ozzy Osbourne and Opeth after it got tired of making hearse-black music for torching churches." Cover art was handled by painter Adam Burke.
To mark the release, SPELL have unveiled a video for "Exquisite Corpse", a track that melds arena-rock melody with theatrical occult rock energy — shred and dread in equal measure. Vocalist and bassist Cam Mesmer explains the song's lyrical focus: "It's so easy to idealize the past and remember things in a way that was never really true. Especially when we lose people, we can tend to think about them in a perfect way, and mourn the loss of an idealised imaginary person that never really existed in the first place."
"Wretched Heart" is available now on all major platforms. Watch the "Exquisite Corpse" video on YouTube.